Nightshift 49: The Bookworm

[chainsaw_royal]

[From here]The dark looks the same, no matter what, but the moment Hime's flashlight beam ghosted over rows of books, she knew something was odd. When a flash of lightning illuminated the darkened bookstore, it was confirmed

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[scalyfishman]

The smell was all wrong. Depth Charge realised it at soon as they walked through the door. Manta rays were hardly renowned for their keen olfactory senses, but even he could tell that the hallway wasn't supposed to smell of dust and paper. It was only in the instant that a sudden glare from outside lit up their surroundings that he finally made the connection.

They were in the book store in Doyleton. What the slag? How the Pit was that even supposed to work? They'd been in the Institute barely a nanoklik ago, and all they'd done was open a-

Click. The door closed neatly behind them, just as he finally realised why Hime's tone had been so urgent. There went the hallway, and the rest of the Institute. Depth Charge stood in shocked silence for a moment, still trying to bend the concept around his logic core, before he managed to speak. "What in the Matrix is going on? How did we end up here?"

From somewhere in the distance there came a roll of thunder.

[chainsaw_royal]

Hime glared at the Depth charge, or more accurately, right through his chest at the door behind him. This was going to be problematic, to say the least.

"So, that's the kind of game he's playing," she said in an annoyed tone. So it was this kind of spell. What was the purpose, though? It would common enough if they were trapped within the institute, but in this case, they were anything but. Besides, trapped within the institute was their default state. So had Landel set up the spell encompassing all of this little world he'd created? What was the point, considering that was all they could reach in the first place? She wanted to investigate the door, but first she needed to secure her surroundings. Unlike the mansion, this was unknown territory for her

[scalyfishman]

Hime sounded pretty slagged off, and really he couldn't blame her. What kind of a cheap joke was this, anyway? "Looks like it," he answered, giving a sigh and lowering his crowbar again. "I wouldn't call this 'renovation', but

[chainsaw_royal]

"So it would seem," Hime observed blandly, stepping around a fallen pile of paperbacks. Her flashlight moved quickly at the sound of something tapping, only to reveal a leak in the roof dripping water droplets onto a discarded hardcover. Other than that, it seemed the building was entirely silent besides the constant patter of rain and the occasional thunder.

"Nothing," said Hime, coming back to the front of the store with a book in hand. It was a waterlogged tome labeled "The Necronomicon", but as she flipped through its pages, it revealed itself to be a collection of short stories. Clicking her tongue, the Royal tossed it aside. "Anything on your end?"

She began wandering towards the counter, looking for anything of use. The most she turned up was a pair of scissors which, frankly, were even worse than the knife she'd stolen from the kitchen. She left it where it was.

[scalyfishman]

The shelves cast deep, uneven shadows against the narrow strips of floor in front of him. He'd never much felt the urge to visit this place before, and he definitely wasn't going to fix that any time soon- this place could be creepy when the situation called for it. But creepiness didn't always make for danger, and no matter how much atmosphere they wanted to pump into the place, there didn't seem to be any actual danger lurking underneath that.

Depth Charge emerged from another aisle a few moments later, crowbar lowered again. "Nothing. The place is deserted." You had to wonder what the point of bringing them here was, though, if there wasn't anything here that could touch them. Yet.

He moved to the counter anyway, leaning over while Hime searched the other side- without luck, he noticed. Well, what did they expect? It was a book shop. The most they'd be able to do with anything in here was give someone a particularly nasty papercut. "So what do we do now, princess? Try the door again? Pit only knows what'll happen this time."

[chainsaw_royal]

"We're left with few other options," Hime said, finally giving up on trying to open the locked drawers or cash register. "First of all, we can't split up. As you can imagine, if we become separated, it will become almost impossible for us to regroup." A bit of a huff, then. "Though, it's not as if we aren't already separated from the rest of the patient population. Secondly, we need to start mapping this all out. To do that

[scalyfishman]

Uh-oh. Hime wasn't happy. Depth Charge sighed, resting both elbows on the counter and listening with surprising patience while she started to speak- and then stopped, just as he heard the first traces of a faint, ragged rumble under the steady beat of rain. No, not a rumble. That was a moan. Exactly the kind of moan he'd heard only a week before.

He stared, then, slowly rising from the counter and turning towards the window with an expression that fell somewhere between disbelieving and outraged. "Oh, gimme a break." Zombies? Again?! As if that hadn't been bad enough last week- looked like someone decided that what they really needed was a rerun

[chainsaw_royal]

Hime wasn't particularly listening to Depth Charge's shouting and it wasn't until he stepped before her that she payed him any attention - lucky for him it was to run vanguard rather than stop her. At the very least, he'd have a few stomped-on toes if that were the case.

"Zombies are threat even the Royal family are forbidden to use," she hissed as she continued towards the window. The door would be useless. "As the only appropriate authority here, it is my duty to contain and eliminate that threat."

Stepping past the display of books, Hime only took a moment to knock away any further shards of glass from the frame with her baseball bat to make sure she wouldn't suffer too bad of injuries before stepping through with Depth Charge into the torrential storm.

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